affairs from the
viewpoint and remoteness of Boston, where once upon a time Miles
Standish and our Puritan forbears handled such matters in a manner
anything but Puritanical. Nothing was left to the military arm of the
Government but temporary submission, so, as has been said, "the Gray
Fox" went off on a hunt for bear, mountain lions, and such big game as
was reported to be awaiting him toward the Grand Canon to the north. An
adjutant-general of the old school was left in charge of the desk and
the department, and all on a sudden found that while Peace and its
commissioners held their sway far to the south, grim-visaged War had
burst upon the northward valleys, and chaos had come again.

The couriers bearing Archer's report to Prescott found others,
similarly burdened, from the upper reservation, from Camp Sandy, and
even from points to the west and south of department head-quarters, all
telling of death and depredation. So, while the chief of staff ruefully
digested these tidings at the office, the couriers proceeded to have a
time in town, to the end that, when replies and instructions were in
readiness to be sent out, only two of the six were in shape to take
them, and Archer's runner--one of the frontier scouts, half Mexican,
half Apache--was one of the two.

Now, the chief of staff had been nearly three years in Arizona, had
served in similar capacity to predecessors of "the Gray Fox," and
naturally thought he understood the Apache, and the situation, far
better than did his new commander, and the fact that he had allowed
this conviction to be known had led to a degree of official friction
between himself and the one aide-de-camp left that was fast verging on
the personal. Bright, almost invariably the companion of the general in
his journeyings, was even now with him, lost in the mountains ninety
miles in one direction; Willett, the newly appointed aide-de-camp, was
with the commander of Camp Almy, ninety miles away in another, while
black-bearded Wickham stood alone at Prescott. Wickham had not been
consulted when Willett was sent with confidential instructions to Almy.
Wickham would have disapproved, and the chief of staff knew it. Wickham
_had_ to be shown Archer's despatch, though the adjutant-general
would gladly have concealed it, and now, in chagrin at the outcome of
affairs at Almy, and in consternation at the ebullition all around him,
the adjutant--general was quite at a loss what to do. Wickham, if
a